The victim was Nick Berg, a small-business owner from Westchester, Pa., who had gone to Iraq to work on reconstruction projects. His body was found on a Baghdad overpass

His murderers said:

"For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage with some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused.

"So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way."

War correspondent: "This is about right and wrong," says Joe Galloway of the Knight Ridder papers, who as a UPI correspondent was the only civilian to win the Bronze Star in Vietnam. "First graders know that. Any policeman who can't figure that out needs some time on the other side of the bars.

"This takes us down in the eyes of the Middle East and the rest of the world. It is one more disaster in a string of disasters that began with the idea that we would topple Saddam Hussein and the grateful Iraqi people would welcome us with showers of rose petals.

Blogger Mark Kleiman says George Bush has hobbled U.S. effectiveness abroad to a degree that Noam Chomsky can only imagine – and that conservatives are likely to be pretty angry when they figure it out.